I have a Facebook friend who constantly is firing off preachy religious or contentious political posts that are clogging up my social stream with stuff I don’t care to read. At the same time, the guy is the dad of one of my son’s best friends and I have to see him on the sidelines of school sporting events, so the last thing I want to do is offend him.

If this scenario sounds familiar, take heart. There are ways to rid your Facebook News Feed of annoying posts.

First, you can unfriend the person—Facebook will not notify the person you have done so. Of course, if the person starts to wonder why he or she is no longer seeing your posts and searches for you, your former connection will find your profile page and see an “Add friend” box on the top of it, a dead giveaway pointing toward what you’ve done.

Facebook

As an alternative, you can tell Facebook to show you fewer posts from a particular person. To do it, click on the little drop-down arrow on the top of something he or she has posted, then choose “Hide.” Facebook then tells you it has hidden the story from your News Feed and gives you the option to “Change what updates you get from (so and so)” or “Organize who you see in news feed.”

If you click on the former, you can uncheck—and tell Facebook you don’t want to receive certain kinds of information about this person—things like life events, status updates, photos, games, comments and likes, music and videos and other activity, essentially everything a person is doing on Facebook. There’s also an option to simply unfollow a person.

Facebook

If you opt to organize your News Feed, you can put people on an acquaintances list so that their posts show up less frequently there as well as get the ability to share things with friends but not acquaintances. Again, nobody will know you’ve put them on this list.

But what about the people who you really care about—the ones you want to see everything they’re doing on Facebook?

For that, click on the settings cog on the top right of your Facebook page >>> Privacy Settings >>> Notifications >>> Close Friends activity. From there, you can turn on Close Friends activity and choose whether you want to receive notifications about what they’re doing on Facebook or on email, as well.

To make sure the right people are on your list of close friends go back to your News Feed and click on “Close Friends” under Friends on the left of the page (if you don’t see Friends there, you’ll need to click on “More”). Once you’re on the Close Friends page, click on Manage List >>> Edit List on the top right of the page. You can delete people by clicking the X on the top right of their photos, or add people through the List Suggestions area, which is on the right side of the page.